Media Lifeline: Video-sharing websites

June 2004: Yahoo! launches the Yahoo! Videoblogging Group, a website
platform for the growing community of videobloggers. Videoblogging was
the natural successor to the sorts of amateur video diaries that
broadcasters such as the BBC had been showcasing, for instance in the
Video Nation strand, since the early 90s.

February 2005: YouTube is created by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and
Jawed Karim. It enables users to share a wide variety of video material,
from short home-made videos and videoblogs to clips pirated from
mainstream music, TV and film companies.

May 2005: A group of five Yahoo! Videoblogging Group employees leaves
to set up blip.tv as an enhanced videoblogging platform. It encourages
regular users to develop threads of serialised content rather than
following the unstructured magpie ethos of the likes of YouTube. Soon
after attracting new funding in 2006, it enters into a partnership
agreement with CNN.

January 2006: Google launches Google Video. It struggles to hit on a
coherent model - it initially attempts to compete with iTunes, offering
fee-based downloads of feature films, then attempts to copy YouTube. But
it builds only a small marketshare by the time Google decides to play
catch-up in a far more serious fashion by buying YouTube itself for
$1.65 million in November 2006.

June 2007: MySpace, the social networking site purchased by Rupert
Murdoch's News Corp for $580 million in July 2005, relaunches its
video-sharing site as MySpaceTV - to remind potential users that it is
now the second-largest such site behind YouTube.

Fast forward

December 2007: In a move that stuns the market with its audacious
genius, Hurley and Chen leave YouTube to launch cc.tv, a
service that gives users access to every closed-circuit television
system and webcam network in the world. However, it causes political
uproar on both sides of the Atlantic. In the US, there are worries about
copycat crime; while in Britain, there are concerns that it might
encourage excessive busking.